The potential uses and recognized advantages of employing directed energy for surgical purposes are ever-increasing. In particular, for example, electrosurgery and laser surgery techniques are now being widely employed to provide significant localized control advantages in both open and laparoscopic applications relative to prior traditional surgical approaches.
Despite the advantages associated with directed energy surgical techniques, one drawback has been the heating of tissue and attendant generation of smoke. Such smoke impedes observation of the surgical site during surgical procedures, and there is a growing concern that the smoke may be a medium for the transport of pathogens away from the surgical site, including viruses such as HIV. In turn, such concerns have contributed to the use of face shields and masks by surgical personnel.
To date, proposed approaches to deal with smoke have focused upon the utilization of devices to either evacuate the smoke by sucking the same into a filtering system, or alternatively to merely blow the smoke away from the surgical site by a pressurized gas stream. Typical smoke evacuators require the movement of large amounts of air to be effective. As a result, such evacuators tend to be not only noisy but space consuming in a surgical theater where space efficiency is at a premium. Proposed approaches for blowing the smoke away from the surgical site suffer from the fact that, since the smoke is not actually removed, the above-noted concerns are either only partially addressed or otherwise actually compounded.